The Baird's Tale

<div class="page traditional" style=" background-color: #fff; "> <article> <header> <h1 style=" font-family: 'Lato'; color: #333333;">What is rape culture?: an interview with Anne-Marie Roy</h1> Eddie Donald-Roué </header> <div class="main"> Over the past semester, the University of Ottawa has been shaken by a crisis. A series of revelations and allegations of misconduct ranging from sexual harassment to rape have implicated a number of figures on campus, from student representatives to the men’s hockey team, and made headlines locally, nationally and even internationally. On February 10, Anne-Marie Roy, the President of the Student Federation of the University (SFUO), learned that she had been the subject of an online discussion in which five of her colleagues, including the then-Vice President Social of the SFUO, referred to her in terms which have since been widely criticized as sexist, vulgar and violent. Her decision to publicly denounce the participants in the conversation, who have since resigned from their posts, created a shockwave which was further amplified when, on March 3, the university suspended its men’s hockey team under suspicion that members of the team had participated in a gang rape while on tour in Thunder Bay. In response, the administration set up a taskforce on respect and equality to study the status and situation of women on campus. The SFUO, concerned that the university’s working group was taking the wrong approach and not tackling the real issue, set up its own Taskforce Against Rape Culture in conjunction with the Graduate Students’ Association (GSAÉD) and other civil society groups on campus. In the discussion of these events, the idea of rape culture has come up again and again. For many, it is in fact the central issue tying together the entire series of scandals that have erupted at the university. But what exactly is rape culture? For the President of the SFUO herself, the term refers to a constellation of beliefs, attitudes and ideas which minimize, trivialize, normalize and, in the most extreme cases, even excuse rape and other acts of sexual violence. In particular, it designates ideas which, in her words, “put the blame on the victim, or on someone who has lived through a difficult experience related to sexual violence”, for instance by insinuating that they are partly responsible for what happened to them because they were intoxicated or dressed in a certain way. According to Ms. Roy, rape culture “is something which is quite pervasive in our society. It’s something we see on television, we talk about on the radio, in song lyrics, and which can also be seen quite regularly on the Internet. It’s the way in which we present sexuality and women. Often, they are degraded by way of sexual violence.” For her, rape culture is not simply a problem particular to uOttawa, or to university campuses in general. “What happened at the University of Ottawa was obviously terrible, but these are not isolated incidents,” she says. “It’s part of the culture, of our society. It’s a broader social problem, and not a problem specific to the University of Ottawa.” For Ms. Roy, fighting rape culture is a matter of basic security. When she first learned about the Facebook conversation about her which would go on to make headlines, she was, she says “a little scared. I felt a little nauseous in the moment because I didn’t know what to think. While reading the conversations, one asks oneself: “Is it real? Is it not real? Is my security at risk on campus? Should I be worried about the security of others?” These are all questions I asked myself in the minutes after I read the conversation.” In her view, the situation was made even worse by the fact that four of the participants in the conversation were Vice Presidents Social of either the SFUO or its various federated bodies. “Four of the five people involved in the conversation were responsible for organizing social events, and for the security of people participating in these events. Some of these events involve alcohol, so of course they have to take place in as safe a context as possible. So to see the people involved in the security and the organization of these events talking about students in this way, that too was worrying.” As president of the student federation, Ms. Roy believes she has a role to play in fighting rape culture. She believes it should be organizations like the SFUO leading the fight rather than the university administration: “I think the student federation and the grad students’ association are in a better position to tackle the problem in a more effective way, and the approach we’ve taken at the SFUO, with GSAÉD, is to ask students to share their experiences coming from different milieus on campus.” According to her, it’s this approach of appealing directly to students, and the fact that it directly names and addresses rape culture, which makes the student Taskforce a much more promising initiative than the working group established by the administration: “I think that if we want to be effective in fighting rape culture then, well, for one thing, we have to start off by recognizing its existence.” For her, this is a task in which everyone have a role to play: “I think we’ve seen so much of rape culture for so many years, everywhere in the media, everywhere in popular culture, that there may be some people who have trouble picking it out and correctly identifying it. So I think the first step, is as a society, to, yes, recognize that there is a problem, but also to educate ourselves.” </div> </article> </div>

Share

Issue 3